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China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

dailybusinessgroup.co.uk

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Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#571

Post by gfodor »

acdha wrote: post #537
gfodor wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true for lots of virtuous acts or acts of survival under authoritative regimes, such as hiding Jews from the Nazis or selling your surplus harvest under Stalin. It’s only if you are privileged (or, arguably, ignorant) to not consider on balance the counterfactual costs of undermining technologies which could de-risk such acts for those being oppressed. (Which may include a future-you.)

Alternately, people who accurately understand the technology and the environment in which it is used might be speaking up against a system which is designed to endanger those people. Using people subject to these risks in service of MLM recruitment pitches is not a moral good.

Thank you for stating your assumption all your opponents are acting out of either malevolence or bad faith. This transparency is often useful for people trying to make sense of which side of an argument has merit.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#572

Post by mikestew »

mettamage wrote: post #441
Loughla wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If crypto still feels as speculative (in terms of trading crypto) 10 years later, then I feel the experiment to find a good use-case has ran for long enough. Maybe I'm taking this to a place you didn't intend, or maybe this is an ignorant question but. . . . What is the US market now, compared to 10 years ago. My experience is that 10 years ago Bitcoin was used to either buy drugs, or as a bet made by college kids t…

I'd agree, but I'm willing to wait and see for 10 more years. For one, I do see some developments nowadays that are making me excited (not money related). Also, tackling blockchain problems is hard. And in all fairness, the speed at which you can send Ripple and similar cryptocurrencies is actually quite cool. It's a shame that it's mostly in its own little bubble still. > Bitcoin was used to either buy drugs In all…

I swear I spend half my upvotes these days on grey comments that, AFAICT, someone simply disagrees with. In this case, the commenter was foolish enough to answer someone's question in a manner free from jackassery; stay classy, HN.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#573

Post by acdha »

gfodor wrote: post #571
acdha wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternately, people who accurately understand the technology and the environment in which it is used might be speaking up against a system which is designed to endanger those people. Using people subject to these risks in service of MLM recruitment pitches is not a moral good.

Thank you for stating your assumption all your opponents are acting out of either malevolence or bad faith. This transparency is often useful for people trying to make sense of which side of an argument has merit.

Kind of like when you accuse anyone pointing out the holes in your argument of being ignorant or apparently unconcerned by atrocities? At this point, anyone promoting blockchains for things which they are known to be unsuitable does need to establish that they are acting in good faith and do not have financial conflicts of interest.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#574

Post by rspeele »

tuesdayrain wrote: post #75
holoduke wrote: post #14

I hope the rest of world follows. There is nothing more volatile than a decentralised crypto currency. The amount of people making a profit from it is less than 5% and energy consumption is beyond acceptable. Crypto as a tech to serve something different is totally fine of course.

> The amount of people making a profit from it is less than 5% I find it amusing how casually you just made up a statistic and used it as justification to ban something. Here's an actual statistic: 100% of people who held Bitcoin for longer than 4 years are up on their investment. edit: Lots of downvotes for an easily verifiable fact. Anyone can look at the BTC chart and see that there is no 4 year span where the pri…

95% is clearly a number pulled out of thin air, but it is likely that most people have not realized a profit from Bitcoin. Where would the money come from? The only way for a majority of investors to realize a (small) gain is for the minority to pay for it in a (larger) loss. And that's for a zero-sum game. In Bitcoin, since running the system involves continuously consuming real world value in the form of billions of dollars worth of energy per year, it's most likely that the majority of participants end up at a loss.

Just imagine everybody in the world buys as much Bitcoin as they can afford, immediately.

How much richer are we all, in aggregate, at the end of the day?

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#575

Post by cm2187 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #555
cm2187 wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so that may have worked before the ban, but unless you have a way to export under the counter, I presume this route is gone after the btc transaction ban.

Well, you'd have to do an off the books / private transaction of BTC-for-CNY, but there's presumably an infinite number of ways for someone to loan / give CNY for (to the government) nothing (and in reality, BTC, etc). And with the CNY, you can buy real goods. And with those real goods, you can export them. And with those exports, you can sell them for foreign currency. So as long as they're running an export-oriente…

But my point is any time you export some physical good, you have a transaction going under the nose of the authorities. That's where they can stop you and ask some questions on the transaction that paid for those goods.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#576

Post by celticninja »

arcticbull wrote: post #416
nightski wrote: post #336

Wow, imagine living in a country where the legal financial assets you own can be turned criminal where accessing them is punished with hard labor. Sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Imagine living in a civilized country that can't bring itself to ban a massive distributed Ponzi scheme with huge environmental consequences. Bitcoin alone uses about 1/10th as much energy as the entire world's concrete production. Even if it were to transition entirely to renewable energy it also generates as much e-waste as an entire first-world country. These things actually have huge meaningful state security ris…

Because banning technology works so well.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#577

Post by gfodor »

acdha wrote: post #573
gfodor wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for stating your assumption all your opponents are acting out of either malevolence or bad faith. This transparency is often useful for people trying to make sense of which side of an argument has merit.

Kind of like when you accuse anyone pointing out the holes in your argument of being ignorant or apparently unconcerned by atrocities? At this point, anyone promoting blockchains for things which they are known to be unsuitable does need to establish that they are acting in good faith and do not have financial conflicts of interest.

> Kind of like when you accuse anyone pointing out the holes in your argument of being ignorant or apparently unconcerned by atrocities?

Yes! This is exactly the kind of behavior you did in your previous post. I'm glad you acknowledge it.

Of course, I did not do what you state here, since I wasn't actually responding to anyone nor were there any "holes in my argument" since I didn't even make an argument being refuted. (I entered this thread here far down the chain of the discussion, if you actually read it.) But it's cool to see that if I had done something like accusing people of such things without any substantive retorts, you'd agree your behavior was the same kind of dodge.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#578

Post by lostmsu »

arcticbull wrote: post #466
nightski wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't even meet the basic definition of a ponzi scheme. This is pure FUD. You might not like it, but that doesn't make it something it is not. There are plenty of other things that I would consider a waste of electricity but I am not going to make doing them punishable by hard labor.

It's a negative sum wealth redistribution scheme the takes money from new entrants and gives it to miners and to old entrants. The miner portion is what makes it negative-sum. It doesn't meet the traditional definition, no, which is why I referred to it as a "distributed Ponzi scheme" - it's closer to an MLM in classical parlance. [edit] Here's the SEC definition: > A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays exi…

Let's see:

"Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that"

"investment fraud" - "induces investors to make purchase or sale decisions on the basis of false information"

Major cryptocurrencies do not present "false information", therefore they are not "investment fraud", therefore they are not Ponzi schemes.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#579

Post by plebianRube »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #565
plebianRube wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically half true, they share the processing load of guessing the next valid block, and then share the profit when the one piece of hardware finally guessed it.

I do not remember when a Chinese ASIC miner ever shared something while I was mining with a laptop. Network shares the load but winner takes it all, i thought.

Those were the bad old days. There are pools now, like the old Seti@Home program. If your mining pool wins you get the percentage of the reward relative to the hashes you tried.

You can try to go it alone but your chances of finding the block reward are incomprehensibly low.

Re: China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’

#580

Post by KingMachiavelli »

cm2187 wrote: post #575
ethbr0 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you'd have to do an off the books / private transaction of BTC-for-CNY, but there's presumably an infinite number of ways for someone to loan / give CNY for (to the government) nothing (and in reality, BTC, etc). And with the CNY, you can buy real goods. And with those real goods, you can export them. And with those exports, you can sell them for foreign currency. So as long as they're running an export-oriente…

But my point is any time you export some physical good, you have a transaction going under the nose of the authorities. That's where they can stop you and ask some questions on the transaction that paid for those goods.

You paid for the transaction in CNY which is perfectly legal & normal (I would assume). The volume of exports from China is crazy and investigating every single transaction is not practical.
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